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"I'm friends with Jason, but he can be an a______," says Rosa. "He really picked on T.J. just because T.J. was so quiet," says another friend of Solomon's. "You know, like being quiet made him weird in the eyes of that little clique of theirs." Solomon took the teasing hard, and even though he had friends, he seemed to become convinced that he was destined to be the campus pariah--"and that idea kept building inside him until he picked up a gun," says Stacey Singleton.
To make matters much worse, the kids say, Solomon believed his girlfriend had recently turned her charms on Jason, of all people. T.J. and the girl had bickered recently, and he, at least, thought the relationship had ended. (Her friends say she denies they had broken up.) Solomon had become increasingly disinterested in school, and the day before the shootings, he got in a fiery argument with two classmates during fourth-period study hall; it ended when Solomon said he would "blow up this classroom." That same day, T.J. told a buddy he had no reason to live.
Littleton produced a national conversation about warning signs, but Solomon's friends must not have been part of that conversation. When asked why no one told a teacher or the principal that T.J. recently threatened to bomb a classroom, the students shrug and look away, dragging on their cigarettes. The look on their face is not of shock or horror, but a numb roll of the eyes, as if they've already begun to see the shooting as some sort of campus ritual, akin to the nuclear-attack drills of the 1950s. Asked why he thought students were resorting to gun violence again and again, Michael Woods, a friend of Cheek's, says, "Kids like T.J. are seeing it and hearing about it all the time now. It's like the new way out for them."
Indeed, at times in Conyers last week there was a sense that the violence had been wrung dry of any emotion. The father of two boys who live near the Solomon home also simply shrugged. Al Morgan won't pull his kids from Heritage, and he doesn't think metal detectors will keep determined murderers out. "It's like winning the lottery," Morgan says of the odds that your kid's school will be next. At a nearby middle school Thursday night, a couple of hundred parents brought students to pick up awards certificates, but only 40 or so remained for a school board meeting. And just one rose to suggest a parent volunteer project to combat violence. No one said much in response.
Of course, not everyone reacted with such flinty nonchalance. Some students said they wouldn't return to Heritage for the final days of the school year, and others say they never want to come back. One girl says she will drop out entirely to begin home schooling. "It's not worth going to school to get shot," says Krystal Graham, 16. It's almost as if Littleton taught us nothing about how to understand the individual traumas that drive certain boys to solve their problems with rifles.
"I think they should do the psychological stuff on him," Ryan Rosa says, speaking of mental health as if it were a surgical procedure that Solomon could undergo that would make things right. When T.J. told his friend Nathaniel Deeter on Wednesday that he was thinking of killing himself, Deeter told him "he was crazy," according to the New York Times. "I mean, a lot of kids say stuff like that."